Essay: The Time I Met An Alien In Berlin

Admittedly, if you are going to meet an Alien from planet Venus, Berlin is probably the best place to do it. Doubly so because I lived in ‘Greenhouse.’ Greenhouse was a great, big, green observatory-looking building in Hermanstrasse, which used to be a block of offices but against every rule and regulation in the book, had been turned into an artists commune instead. It was like an office block after a mad max style apocalypse, where artists pretended to do art and mostly got wrecked all day and made Indian food. The rooms were little boxes with those office block tiled ceilings, and I lived in my friends hallway on a flea-bitten and sheetless mattress because I’d spent all my money on beer and kebabs. I’d nowhere to live, and kindly my friend took me in. Part of me desperately wanted to just call Berlin a failed experiment and go home to mum and dad, but another part of me said ‘feck that.’ I’m not going back in the box. I’m an adult (apparently)!

In the first six months of living in …